Las Hermanas leader recalls role in Catholic Church’s 1970s upheaval

Las Hermanas changed church for Hispanics

Sister Yolanda Tarango speaks Monday October 5, 2015 at the University of the Incarnate Word. Tarango was giving a talk on the grass roots Latina movement.

Sister Yolanda Tarango speaks Monday October 5, 2015 at the University of the Incarnate Word. Tarango was giving a talk on the grass roots Latina movement.

Photo: John Davenport, Staff / San Antonio Express-News

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Sister Yolanda Tarango speaks Monday October 5, 2015 at the University of the Incarnate Word. Tarango was giving a talk on the grass roots Latina movement.

Sister Yolanda Tarango speaks Monday October 5, 2015 at the University of the Incarnate Word. Tarango was giving a talk on the grass roots Latina movement.

Photo: John Davenport, Staff / San Antonio Express-News

Image 3 of 3

Sister Yolanda Tarango tells a University of Incarnate Word audience how the Las Hermanas movement protested racism and sexism in religious orders and the Catholic Church.

Sister Yolanda Tarango tells a University of Incarnate Word audience how the Las Hermanas movement protested racism and sexism in religious orders and the Catholic Church.

Photo: John Davenport /San Antonio Express-News

Las Hermanas leader recalls role in Catholic Church’s 1970s upheaval

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If any of those gathered before Sister Yolanda Tarango on Monday came to hear about the prayerful work Las Hermanas waged in the 1970s to get the Catholic hierarchy to better serve its Hispanic constituents, they would have been disappointed.

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Tarango, author of “Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice in the Church” and one of the remaining leaders of the Las Hermanas movement, instead delivered a powerful account of how and why a group of Chicana nuns indeed prayed for change — but also joined picket lines, staged protests and wrote unrelenting letters of criticism to Catholic bishops.

Her talk on the University of the Incarnate Word campus, organized to celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month, underscored that the work of promoting change rarely gets done by asking nicely. Even the group’s name illustrated the group’s mind-set, Tarango said. In “Las Hermanas: Unidas en Acción y Oración (United in Action and Prayer),” “action” was placed purposefully before “prayer.”

“We were committed to action in the community and not just prayers behind the convent walls,” she said.

Large numbers of Mexican-American women joined convents, spurred by the Chicano civil rights movement, only to face convents’ middle-class values and institutionalized racism, assigned to schools and hospitals that didn’t serve their low-income, Spanish-speaking communities, Taranga said.

While convents did much to educate Latina nuns, she said, they failed to value their cultural and religious traditions. “We didn’t realize at the time that we would (join congregations) at the price of leaving our people and our cultural identity at the convent door.

“We were discouraged from seeking out other Latinas or speaking Spanish,” said Tarango, a member of Sisters of the Charity of the Incarnate Word who just completed her term as congregational leader, the first Latina to serve in that capacity. She’s also executive director of Visitation House, a transitional housing program for homeless mothers and children.

Those midcentury Latina nuns, some of whom eventually broke with their congregations, contributed to Las Hermanas’ groundbreaking work, which ultimately created a field of study called Mujerista Theology. When Tarango asked the UIW audience if any academics in the room have taught the subject, several hands went up.

This year Las Hermanas was honored by the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States for its contributions to theology and the academy.

Tarango said Las Hermanas emerged as a voice for Latina nuns but also became a leader in the “articulation of Hispanic women’s experience, spirituality and liberationist methodology.”

Las Hermanas’ two founders were Texans: Georgina Ortega of the Victoryknoll sisters in El Paso and Gloria Gallardo, a Holy Spirit sister in San Antonio.

Las Hermanas made “investigative visits” to check the employment policies at diocesan offices in Spanish-speaking-dominant areas. It found few Hispanics, even in Hispanic ministry, and lay leaders without the authority to implement ideas to better serve Hispanic Catholics, and wrote to those dioceses to critize “the prevailing mentality that the Hispanic apostolate was a necessary evil” rather than integral to Catholic life.

It not only pushed against the underlying racism and sexism in religious orders and the Catholic Church, it challenged Hispanic sexism, “liberation theology, which didn’t see sexism as a form of oppression; feminist theology, which presented white women’s experience as normative,” and cultural theologies that lacked economic and class analysis, she said.

Today, Las Hermanas is “on hiatus,” she said. Several of its leaders have died, and younger nuns have not replaced them. She has hopes “to gear up again.”

But its lasting legacies are its contributions to theological study, the works written about it and the Latina Catholic and ecumenical groups that have been created in its place, Tarango said.